A performance monitor is a computer program application that is used to monitor various activities on a computer such as usage of central processing units, memory, and network. The information gathered from such monitoring usually helps to determine the cause of problems on a local or remote computer by measuring the performance of hardware, software services, and applications.
As an example of conventional embodiments of a monitored system and a monitoring application, consider a database management system and a relating performance monitor. To give a concrete example, consider IBM® DB2®, which is a family of relational database management system (RDBMS) software products within IBM's broader Information Management Software line, and IBM Tivoli® OMEGAMON® XE for DB2 Performance Expert on z/OS®. The latter software product is a comprehensive assessment application, which can be used to evaluate the efficiency and optimize the performance of DB2 in a z/OS environment. This application helps to monitor, analyze, and tune the performance of IBM DB2 Universal Database and IBM DB2 applications on z/OS. It provides views of performance data so that an administrator can identify performance bottlenecks. A graphical user interface (GUI) displays much performance information about monitored DB2 database systems. Since there is a large amount of performance information about monitored objects that needs to be displayed to a DB2 administrator, there are many GUI panels in such a DB2 performance monitoring application.
When a monitored system has a specific problem, the administrator typically navigates from one GUI panel to another in a monitoring application and checks the displayed complex information for specific problem patterns to get all details about the performance problem until he has found the root cause of the problem. The selection of activated GUI panels may strongly depend on the specific problem and on the preferences and experiences of the administrator. Altogether, the navigation and problem analysis may be very time-consuming for the following reasons: GUI panels may have different layouts because they are related to different information categories. An administrator may find it difficult to correlate information on the distributed GUI panels and to identify the root cause. The user may spend unnecessarily long time on figuring out problems that are well-known. Moreover, knowledge about problem resolution strategies is always changing because it depends on the monitored system and individual user experience. Hence, there is a need to provide a dynamic and user-friendly way of simplifying problem resolution based on a plurality of GUI panels, where the resolution process takes into account repeatedly changing situations and individual user strategy.